I have an iRex Iliad which has saved Goldsmiths reams and reams of paper and drops and drops of printer toner. I find my PDF article on Ingenta or wherever and save it to my reader. This is quicker than printing. Another thing – I was an external examiner for a doctorate not long ago. I read and annotated the thesis during my commute, and rather than carrying 300 sheets of A4 around with me, which would have been a real inconvenience given the significant distance I walk each day, I saved it to the reader and backed up the annotations regularly (again, instantaneous, like saving a file).

Below are some quick tips to consider when choosing a reader. The thing to do is to come at it from the basis of your needs, habits, practices. Do you want to:

Read PDFs – journal articles or students’ work?

Annotate work, save the annotations, run handwriting recognition on them to turn them into machine-readable (searchable) text?

Download and pay for books on a whim, on the move?

Download and read a newspaper?

Rapidly cross-reference between different texts, or between a text and a notes page?

Bookmark bits of a text and revisit them easily?

Search a text?

Convert text to speech and plug in your headphones?

Carry on for long periods between charging the battery?

Replace the battery on demand?

Communicate with a good-sized user-group for tips, tricks and getting the most out of your reader – in plain English?

Configure your own texts (e.g. Gutenberg texts) for easy reading / annotation – for example, I have a template which gives me 1.5 spacing, a comfortable sized font for me and bigger margins at the bottom and right (I’m right-handed) for annotation.

Get locked into a contract with a single company (as with Amazon’s Kindle)

Read and input in different languages?

Additional questions:

Are you savvy with technology – will you be able to find the add-ons for an open source operating system to make your reader do what you want, for example?